A friend of mine once went on a workshop about negotiation skills. He told me about a story that delegates had been told on the course. It went something like this; you may have heard it or a version of it before.

On a recent instructional design course I was co-hosting, a delegate asked if I had some tips in dealing with new subject matter experts (SMEs), particularly when the whole organisation is new to eLearning.

Have you ever started an eLearning project, seemingly with the right people to deliver but then realised that you had a serious gap between the project requirements and the skills at hand?

Why does this happen? Well, part of the problem is that demarcations between instructional designer, eLearning developer and content developer are often very blurred. I was co-hosting an instructional design workshop the other week and was struck by how many people were attempting to do all these roles at once. Yet, the skillsets involved are quite different. Sometimes I think you could equate it to asking a plumber to do an electrician’s job. These are allied trades but would you want the plumber to re-wire your house? No. But, you might be OK with them replacing a plug.

I had a sudden flashback weeks ago. I remembered creating eLearning courses long before the days of the modern authoring tools. I was transported into a time (and yes it was a fair few years ago!) when as an eLearning author you had long, circuitous discussions with developers about the functionality you would like. They would listen politely, promise little and around two to three months later deliver even less. At which point, I recall re-writing courses to fit the functionality that we had actually been delivered.